


The Shocking Mortality Of A Boss

by Tvieandli



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tvieandli/pseuds/Tvieandli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Is it ever not just like that?" Jean asked. His voice was rye and hard. It made Armin flinch. "You pull a trigger, Armin. You press a fucking button. You don't even need to be touching them. You don't even need to be in the same room. You just make a decision. You press a button and they're dead. Just like that."</p><p>Pre Jean/Armin shorts set in the 1920's as criminals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shocking Mortality Of A Boss

Armin had been over the plan at least eighty times by the time they made it from one hotel to the other. Jean simply sprawled over the seat beside him, looking lavish in the new suit Marco had bought for him that weekend. He'd been told to wear it to dinner, and Armin had seen the eyes, the look in them. 

He didn't understand it really. Most people said it was a sickness, but Marco didn't seem sick. Neither did Jean for that matter, and Armin knew what Jean let Marco do when no one was around to ask questions. 

They were supposed to enter the hotel room, and unpack their things quickly and quietly. Afterwards, they would take turns watching the seventeenth window from the right in the building across the street until 12:30 afternoon the following day when they would be given a six minute interval to take the shot.

Jean entered the hotel room and took off his clothing before he even thought about unpacking. Armin watched him from the corner of his eye as he stripped his suspenders off his shoulders, and slunk out of his undershirt. 

Marco clearly had good taste, even if it was dark and twisted. Armin had to admit that if he'd been a woman he would definitely have been inclined to open his legs to someone like Jean.

He opened the important suitcase first, and began to put the rifle together. Jean poured himself a tumblr of golden liquid, and lit a cigarette, lounging against the wall as if they weren't about to kill someone in a little under eleven hours. 

"You're quiet," Jean observed randomly, brown eyes inquisitive when Armin met them.

"I like to think of it as task oriented myself," Armin said quietly.

Jean flashed him a smile. "Forget it," he said then, looking out the window. There was a moment of quiet between them that was filled with the sound of metal pieces clicking together. "You know anything about this gun?" Jean asked.

Armin shrugged. He knew more than most would think seeing him at first and taking in the feminine attributes he was so often teased for, but he supposed he also didn't know a great deal.

"It's German," he continued. "During the war, they decided to make it more accurate so they put that scope on the top. Works like the ones astronomers use only you're lookin' at someone's brains powdered on the wall instead of the Andromeda galaxy."

Armin sucked his lips back against his teeth, and set the gun down on the table by the window. "Morbid isn't it?"

"What?"

"This gun." Jean regarded him with vague interest, and Armin felt himself pale a bit. Here was a man who was willing to give what was necessary regardless of society's opinion of that. He was an ambitious man, one who had killed to achieve his ends, and one that did not shy away from death. Armin was not exactly keen on arousing his interest. "Here we are, using all these advancements in science to kill ourselves. It's morbid," he said quickly, averting his eyes to break Jean's gaze.

Jean hummed and looked out the window again.

"It's not that big a deal you know?" he said after a long silence had passed. Armin watched the smoke curl off the lit tip of his cigarette "People die everyday."

"I'm not killing them," Armin said.

The other man fixed him with a look that was really neither here nor there, but clearly had the purpose of cataloguing him in some way. It made him nervous, and he tried to ignore it all together.

"You know I like you?" Jean asked. Armin jumped a bit at the suddenness of the confession. "Don't know what it is yet, but I'm pretty sure. You're a trust worthy guy."

"Why do you say that?"

Jean shrugged and took a sip of his liquor. "I dunno. Maybe it's because Marco trusts you, and Marco never loses a bet."

That statement implied faith. Faith implied trust. Armin wondered momentarily if perhaps he had read the situation wrong and it was not Jean being willing to do anything for position so much as it was Jean reciprocating Marco's oddities. The thought made Armin vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping under this man's "watchful gaze". He swallowed around a thickness in his throat.

"Don't look so terrified, that's a good thing," Jean said, turning to the desk, and snubbing his cigarette out in the ash tray there. He slid his empty tumblr onto the wood beside it, and sat heavily on the bed to begin tugging his shoes off his feet.

"What is the nature of your relationship with Mr Bodt?" Armin asked. 

Jean froze halfway through undoing his sock garters. The look in his eyes when he fixed Armin with them spoke volumes of answers that never sound have been prompted. "What relationship?" he dead panned.

Armin bit the inside of his cheek and decided to be bold for once. "The one that allows it to be appropriate for him to buy you fifty dollar suits," Armin said.

"Marco is a very generous person," Jean said, using the truthful non sequitur rather than lying to him outright.

"Is he generous with all the young men, or is it just you."

"It's just me," Jean bit, truthfully. "Don't go getting any ideas about it either. I simply have a healthy relationship with my employer."

"So it wouldn't be far fetched to assume he has a bias toward you due to your relationship?" Armin asked.

"I said I liked you, not that I was ready to marry you," Jean snapped.

"I'm sorry," Armin said quickly. Jean looked away from him.

"Forget about it."

He laid back on the bed, and carded his fingers up through the longer hair on top of his head. "Why are you even asking about any of that junk?"

"Well I'm going to be sharing a room with you, and I just wanted to make sure you wouldn't get any ideas from me looking like a girl," Armin said.

Jean barked a harsh laugh into the air, and moved his hands so that he could look Armin over. His eyes raked over the younger man, from the blonde hair atop his head to the ratty fraying edges of his shoe laces.

When his eyes met Armin's again, he was smiling softly. "I don't think you look like a girl," he reassured in a manner that was nothing close to reassuring.

Armin wondered frantically how two men even engaged in that sort of activity together. He came up with the answer of anal penetration, and felt his chest spasm frantically at the idea of Jean holding him down and forcing him to take it.

"Still, don't worry about it. My sexual appetite only has room for gorgeous little numbers like that friend of yours."

"Eren?" Armin asked, remembering the anger in Jean's eyes as Eren challenged him time and time again.

"No! Mikasa!" Jean said harshly, sitting up. "Why would you assume I meant Eren?"

"Marco?"

"What's Marco got to do with it?"

"Well you two-" Armin trailed off, shooting a coy look up at Jean's face. "Never mind," he said upon seeing the carefully sculpted confusion.

"Nah," Jean said after a moment. "I'm more in a mind for beautiful oriental women than idiot diego pains in my ass"

Armin pursed his lips, watching Jean drag himself the rest of the way onto the bed, and curl onto his side. "I know how you're thinking, and it's not like that," he said to the quiet out of nowhere, making Armin draw a surprised breath. "Marco ain't like that. He an' me ain't nothin' more than two good buddies."

That was a lie. Armin had heard Jean moaning Marco's name through heavy wooden doors that weren't quite as heavy as some people thought. Armin knew for a fact that the relationship between Chicago's best number's man and his lucky charm was anything but innocent. 

He didn't push it. Instead he took the first watch, and watched Jean sleep fitfully for hours, and stared at the seventeenth window until his eyes were bleeding.

Jean woke with a start half way through Armin's watch, hands flailing through the air, panicked voice calling for Marco once, quietly in the dark. Armin sat, and watched the man grip at the bedsheets. Clearly it was reciprocated, he thought as Jean's brown eyes popped open with panic. Clearly Jean suffered from the same inversion.

It could have been worse though he supposed as he handed the man a glass of water. Jean was down right virtuous in comparison to Armin himself after all.

 

That was the first time they really worked together. The first time the two of them were together in a room alone. They'd worked well though, and Marco said he had a preference to Armin when it came to employing the services of the "Titan Trio", so Marco hired Armin to take out his trash, and Jean was his supervisor to make sure he did it right.

They spent many hours in two bed hotel rooms, waiting for the right time to enact a hit. 

Jean said Armin was a good shot, and smoked too many cigarettes while leaning out of windows. He carried a flask on him almost all the time, but whiskey wasn't to his taste. Jean drank gin mostly. Armin hated the taste of juniper berries. 

Armin hated the taste of liquor in general. Jean spent most of his time drunk. They were an odd pair. 

They'd known each other six months, and pulled eight hits when Armin opened the door on April sixth and found Jean standing on the stoop, clutching his hat, looking like a lost child. 

"What are you doing here?" he asked in a hushed toned, pulling the door close to his side to keep Jean obscured. "Eren might see you!"

Jean rolled a single shoulder at him, and looked blankly around at Armin's stoop.

"Can we go some place?" he asked, and he sounded desperate if the frayed edge to his voice was anything to go by. 

"Where?" Armin asked.

Jean shrugged again, arms pulling back a bit so that he opened his chest up. "Anywhere? Not here. Just some place. We can hop on a train and ride all the way down to Atlantic City."

"Why?" Armin asked.

Jean gave him a mirthless half laugh. "Booze? Women? Gambling? Why not?"

"Jean, I don't drink."

"Women?"

"I'm not the most interested."

"Not even gambling?"

"I don't even know how to play Black Jack, Jean," Armin said. "Why do you want to take me to Atlantic City?" he asked, stressing the "me", putting an emphasis on himself because he didn't understand. This was a powerful man who had fought for a very long time, and gotten very far in the world. Someone who Armin had only known a little while in the grand scheme of things, who he'd spent maybe a few hundred hours with in hotel rooms with talking about stupid things.

"Please, Armin?" Jean asked then, which was how Armin knew something was really wrong.

It was why he stepped back from the door jam, and asked the man to come inside. A closer look, and there was blood on the inside of his wrist, a faint peppering of red on his sleeve, a smudge on the side of his shoe.

Armin neglected to ask who Jean had killed, or fought. It wasn't his business, and he was used to people stepping over the threshold with blood on their clothing. He just wasn't used to them looking so rattled about it anymore. 

Jean was pale, and his hands were shaking on his hat when he hung it simply on the coat rack. Armin took his jacket before ushering the man into his room, and instructing him to sit on the bed. Jean did as he was asked.

He had a kind of movie star air about him. Jean seemed like the kind of attractive guy people would put on the silver screen so women could faint over him. Now he just looked sad in his expensive, tailored clothes sitting in Armin's shitty apartment with blood on him.

"What happened?" Armin asked.

Jean was incredibly still. The sleeve holes of his vest folded around his shoulders when he pulled his hands over his face. 

"Marco's dead," Jean said.

His words fell flat in the air. Armin felt them like a punch to the gut. 

Everything that Jean was Marco had been a thousand times greater. Marco was the unnerving entity in the room who radiated clam control. Marco was what Armin immediately thought of when he thought of powerful, dangerous people. Marco was their boss.

"What happened?" he heard himself ask. 

Jean shrugged. Armin could see tears welling up in his eyes, frantic for a place to go. "He died," Jean said. "He died, and he's dead."

"Just like that?"

"Is it ever not just like that?" Jean asked. His voice was rye and hard. It made Armin flinch. "You pull a trigger, Armin. You press a fucking button. You don't even need to be touching them. You don't even need to be in the same room. You just make a decision. You press a button and they're dead. Just like that."

Armin pursed his lips, and tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about it a lot. "How'd it happen?" he asked

"Well how should I fucking know? Am I god? Do I know all?" Jean returned. He was a bit hysterical. Armin didn't really blame him though, he couldn't bring himself to blame anyone for taking it hard when somebody died.

"You weren't there?" he clarified.

Jean met his eyes, and broke into a thousand pieces. He didn't look like a movie star when he cried. He looked like a child, gripping tight to the front of Armin's shirt, and screaming into the fabric.

Armin wrapped his arms around the man's shoulders, and pressed close because he understood. His parents had died when he was six. His grandfather had died when he was ten. He was no stranger to this. He knew it in his bones the way an animal knew it had to eat to live.

Armin had once watched through a cracked door as they touched each other. Not a strange sort of touching. Just the casual sort of touching you catch between a husband and wife when no one's looking. It had been sweet, and innocent. It hadn't seemed all so bad really.

Honestly, Armin had been jealous of that kind of closeness. He was jealous of the look in their eyes, the smiles on their lips as thumbs pressed into cheekbones. Touching. 

Armin was touching Jean now. Their skin was far from pressed together, separated by layers of clothing, shirts and sweaters and vests. They were touching. Jean was touching him, pulling him close, holding on the way a drowning man holds to safety.

"I'm sorry," Armin whispered softly, watching Jean pull away, and wipe at his eyes.

"You didn't shoot him," Jean said.

"No."

Jean reached out, and grabbed his hand, lacing their fingers together, wet digits against dry ones. Armin stared at the conjunction for a while, and decided not to question it. Jean had just lost Marco after all. It would be like loosing a wife, Armin thought, seeing someone like that everyday and spending all your time with them. After a while that person would mean so much it was almost absurd. 

That was how much Armin loved Eren and Mikasa. He couldn't even imagine the depths of the pain that would be loosing them.

"Can I stay?" Jean asked without making eye contact. 

"Yeah," Armin said.

"Thanks. I just don't want to be alone."


End file.
